What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word budget? It's a meager little word, one that all too often comes after tight. Maybe you think of this word as an adjective, something to describe a cheap and substandard car or hotel. Budget brings to mind rationing, a kind of money diet. If you're like many people, budgeting is something you do with a kind of deflated spirit: budgeting means bargain bin quality and the sad sense that what you want is going to be just out of reach.

Is the end near? Of course, no one knows the answer to this question. What I do know is there are a few things I want to have just in case. I am not someone who is hoping for an apocalypse, but I am someone who is prepared in case it comes our way. With The Minimalist Guide to Prepping: Being Prepared Without Being Obsessed, I want to teach you what will come in handy in case the SHTF. I don't think that we should spend the last calm days we have obsessing over the being ready for a "Doomsday".

What you have here are not minimalist works composed for guitar, but rather pieces arranged for the instrument of Italian guitarist Massimo Menotti (apparently no relation to Gian Carlo). All three are early minimalist works from between 1967 and 1969, and devotees of Philip Glass' Orange Mountain Music label, on which the album appears, may be surprised by the stark rigor of the two Glass compositions, Music in Similar Motion and Two Pages, which use large-scale additive structures in strict ways. The last work on the album, Steve Reich's Piano Phase, is the best known.